Scientists studying how the brain reacts to storytelling have found that listening to podcasts, especially ones that tell stories, can make time pass much quicker than music can.

“Consider the case of just the word ‘dog,’” Dr. Gallant said. “Hearing that is going to make you think about how a dog looks, how it smells, how the fur feels, the dog you had as a kid, a dog that bit you on your paper route. It’s going to activate the entire network for ‘dog.’”

And so it goes, for each word and concept as it is added to the narrative flow, as the brain adds and alters layers of networks: A living internal reality takes over the brain. That kaleidoscope of activation certainly feels intuitively right to anyone who’s been utterly lost listening to a good yarn.

I know that podcasts have been indispensable to my commute for years, never more so than now as my commute has lengthened to 2-1/2 to 3 hours per day.